“I asked you a question.”

“I have a gun pointed at you under this table,” Desmond said. “If you’re not the man I spoke with on the phone, I will shoot you, then I will figure out who sent you, and I will find them and get my answers from them.”

The man grew very still. “You said to wear a navy peacoat, jeans, sunglasses, and a hat. To hold up a sign that said ‘Looking Glass Tours’ in Pariser Platz.”

“Where are the clothes?”

The man swallowed, still visibly nervous. “I slipped them under a bathroom stall in the teahouse.”

“What’s your name?”

Confusion crossed the man’s face.

“Humor me,” Desmond said.

“Garin Meyer.”

The night before, and all that morning, Desmond had considered very carefully what he would say to this man. And he had decided to lay it all on the line. He needed answers, and he sensed that time was running out.

“Garin, yesterday morning, when I woke up in the Concord Hotel, that man was dead in my living room. I had a big bruise on my ribs and a knot on my head, and I don’t remember anything prior to that—who I am, what happened to me, or how he died.”

Garin shook his head, clearly skeptical. “You’re lying.”

“I’m not. I found a note in my pocket. It led me to your phone number.”

Garin squinted and glanced away from Desmond, as if contemplating whether he believed him.

“What do you want from me?”

“Answers. I’m trying to figure out what happened to me.”

Garin looked incredulous. “You want answers from me?”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Because you owe me some answers.” Garin glanced around. “Forget it. I’m done.”

He began to stand, but Desmond leaned forward and grabbed his forearm. “You said someone was following you. What if it’s the same person who killed Gunter Thorne?”

That got Garin’s attention.

“You really want to walk away without hearing what I have to say?”

Garin exhaled and settled back into the chair.

“Okay. Good. Let’s start over. How do we know each other? What do you do?”

“I’m an investigative journalist writing for Der Spiegel. You contacted me a few weeks ago.”

“Why?”

“To discuss a story I’d written. It was about multi-national corporations that were possibly colluding with each other on everything from bid-fixing to currency manipulation and unauthorized clinical trials. You said I’d stumbled upon something much bigger, that I’d only seen the tip of the iceberg. You wanted to meet. You promised me the biggest story of my career, ‘possibly the biggest story of all time.’”

“A story about what?”

“The Looking Glass.”

The three words struck fear into Desmond. But try as he might, he couldn’t remember why.

“What is the Looking Glass?” he asked.

“According to you, it’s a project that has been going on for over two thousand years. A scientific endeavor on a scale the world has never seen before. You said the greatest scientific minds in history, across generations, had been working on the Looking Glass, and that it was near completion. Your words to me were that it would make the Manhattan Project and the creation of the nuclear bomb look like a middle school science fair exhibit.”